When you’re using Google+ Hangouts to broadcast, say, a live concert, there hasn’t been a way to make it full-screen for your wonderful viewers. Basically, it would show a big window with you in it, along with a smaller window under it. A full-screen option has been a long-requested feature, and the Hangouts team announced today that this has been added due to popular demand, much like the recent pan and zoom feature for photos.
Hangouts On Air take your live streaming Hangout and push it to an embeddable YouTube player, which records for later viewing as well. If you’re a band, a teacher or any type of performer, you’ll be happy to know that your one-camera show will now have a gorgeous viewing option.
Here’s the before and after, as shared by Google’s Dori Storbeck:
This feature is now the default. It’s a pretty important one to have for professional musicians or news organizations, as the original display was kind of, well, amateur. Attracting these types of users helps Google build out a social platform that integrates with all of its products, as Hangouts On Air demonstrates by working quite nicely with YouTube. When you think about it, the service takes a lot of the hard work out of shooting live video, recording it and then sharing it to places like YouTube. It’s done seamlessly.
Hangouts have been the breakout feature of Google’s social suite, Google+, since its launch. As we noted before, it uses extremely complex technology to stitch participants together into one chat, with seamless camera switching. It’s still easy to use, though, which is the magic.
If you have more than one participant, you can still go full screen by using Google’s Cameraman app to put the main speaker in the background.
Incremental changes, small tweaks, and improvements: This is the Google way.
[Photo Credit: Flickr]
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
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